Who withdraws after getting a BJP Lok Sabha ticket? Meet the 2 dropouts from Gujarat

In 2014, after Narendra Modi won from both Vadodara and Varanasi in his first Lok Sabha election en route to becoming Prime Minister, he vacated the Gujarat constituency.It was then that Ranjan Bhatt, at the time the deputy mayor of Vadodara, stepped in to contest the bypoll from the Vadodara seat, and won it by more than 5 lakh votes.

It showed how far Bhatt had come from 2000, when she contested as a rebel candidate against the BJP in the municipal elections after she was denied a ticket – and won. On March 23, came another turning point in the 62-year-old leader’s career, when she announced she was pulling out of the Lok Sabha race following voices of rebellion over ticket to her from the Vadodara seat.

Bhikhabhai Thakor, 56, on the other hand, has had a relatively slower rise – if as steady. The former VHP leader’s 17 electoral contests in Gujarat, in his 27-year political career, have so far been from taluka till district level, and he was staring at his first national contest, from the Sabarkantha Lok Sabha seat – till he too announced he was withdrawing, soon after Bhatt did.

Days earlier, the BJP MLA from Savli in Vadodara, Ketan Inamdar, had announced his resignation from the Assembly. While he took it back within hours, Inamdar indicated the rancour was not gone, by saying that his ongoing third term as MLA would be his last.

In the water-tight Gujarat BJP, now in power in the state for nearly three decades, and the home state of both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, such open expressions of unhappiness – if not “dissent” – are rare. For these to happen in quick succession, unheard of.

On Sunday, the BJP named new candidates for the tickets given up by Bhatt and Thakor – Hemang